Strengthening resource management training programs within indigenous universities, Mexico
Background
Volcán Pico de Orizaba, Sierra de Zongolica, Veracruz (Photo: M.Alexiades)About 80% if remaining forests in Mexico are community-owned, a fact which attests to the ability and effectiveness of local forest managment practices. Over the past several decades, as tropical forests in Mexico and elsewhere become valued, commoditized and subject to increasingly complex forms of legislation and intervention by external agents, however, it has become increasingly difficult for many of these local communities to continue using and managing their forest resources. In order to legally, and ultimately effectively, utilize their territories and natural resources, communities need to navigate through important, novel yet shifting institutional, policy, and market contexts; contexts over which many rural communities have no control and limited awareness and understanding.
Community of Zincalco, Sierra de Zongolica, Veracruz (Photo: R. Hidalgo)PPI is actively working with local counterparts in Mexico, developing training programs, teaching materials and curricula that will hlep form a new type of indigenous professional, one endowed with a broad and well-integrated set of skills that enables communities with viable institutions of environmental governance to effectively interface with external agents, the State and the market. The overall goal is to help reduce dependency on external inputs, allow communities to better draw on their local skills and abilities, generating employment, promoting community organization and self-governance, and ultimately also facilitating the implementation and success of external interventions. Most importantly it seeks to help insure that community-owned forests remain in the able hands of those people who have lived in, used, and stewarded them for so long.
Intercultural forest management and land-use zoning in Veracruz
Sede Grandes Montañas, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, Tequila, Veracruz (photo: M.Alexiades)Working with the intercultural university of Veracruz (UVI, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural) and MIMOSZ (MIMOSZ, Manejo Integral de Montes de la Sierra de Zongolica), we are improving and broadening the scope and reach of the training programs within the UVI's campus in the tropical mountains of Zongolica, Veracruz. We are currently involved in the design and implementation of two courses, one on forest management (Manejo Integral de Recursos Forestales Maderables y no Maderables) and one on land-use management (Ordenamiento Intercultural del Territorio). Download the report of the 2011 course on intercultural land-use management here.
Intercultural land-use zoning course, UVI (Photo: R. Hidalgo)
(Photo: M.Alexiades)
In addition to training a new cohort of indigenous professionals, technicians and foresters with a broad range of useful practical skills and tools these courses also:
- provide an effective mechanism through which to design teaching materials and curricula that can be used elsewhere.
- allow the team to hand-pick a highly promising group of young students that can be subsequently mentored and directly connected to real-life community management processes and problems as part of their advanced training.
- are specifically designed to allow indigenous peoples and owners and managers of community forests and lands to successfully navigate through the State-imposed technical, legal and bureaucratic aspects of community-based resource management and conservation.
Participatory Mapping, Zincalco (Photo:M.Alexiades)
Video editing, UVI (Photo:M.Alexiades)
